Joelle Pineau, Chief A.I. officer of Cohere, speaks at the Meta AI Day in London, England in April, 2024.Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press
Cohere Inc. is acquiring biopharma company Reliant AI, which has operations in Montreal and Berlin, to expand its presence in the life sciences sector.
The deal is the second such transaction for Toronto-based Cohere this year. In April, Cohere said it was merging with German AI company Aleph Alpha. While that deal was presented as a merger-of-equals, Cohere is the larger of the two companies and the combined entity will be headquartered in Toronto and bear the Cohere name.
Reliant makes an AI-powered platform for life science analysts to conduct research and literature reviews, analyze clinical trial data, and model drug candidates for market viability, among other tasks. Since launching, Reliant has scored customers such as GSK plc and Ipsen Pharma.
Reliant’s 35 employees will join Cohere. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Canadian AI firm Cohere, Germany’s Aleph Alpha announce merger
Reliant’s focus on the life sciences industry fits with Cohere’s thesis that different industries will require specialized tools in addition to general-purpose AI.
“At the speed at which the market is moving, it’s important for us to be able to move into those spaces very fast,” Joelle Pineau, Cohere’s chief AI officer, said on Monday. “When you find the right company that already has the credibility, the talent density and initial product offering, it’s a no-brainer.”
Reliant was founded in 2023 by machine learning researchers Karl Moritz Hermann and Marc Bellemare, both of whom previously worked for Google’s DeepMind division in Europe. Mr. Bellemare studied at McGill University and the University of Alberta, and also led the reinforcement learning team at Google Brain in Montreal. The third co-founder, Richard Schlegel, previously worked as a director at consulting firm EY-Parthenon in Germany.
Mr. Hermann and Mr. Bellemare will become vice-presidents at Cohere.
Reliant raised US$11.3-million in seed funding in 2024 from investors including Inovia Capital in Montreal and angel investor Mike Volpi, who made an early investment in Cohere while a partner at Index Ventures. Inovia is also a Cohere investor.
There are other connections between the companies, too. Ms. Pineau has known Mr. Bellemare for some 20 years, from the time she started teaching at McGill and he was completing a master’s degree in computer science.
Ms. Pineau said that Reliant has proprietary data and AI models for the pharmaceuticals industry, and that Cohere will integrate these capabilities into its own platform, called North. Powered by Cohere’s large language models, or LLMs, North can be used to create documents and automate office tasks, and can be tailored for specific industries.
Last year, U.S. revenue management company Ensemble Health Partners said it would use a custom version of North, and in March the two companies said they would build a fine-tuned LLM for tasks related to revenue management in the healthcare industry.
The market for general-purpose AI models is dominated by a handful of players, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Cohere. Ms. Pineau said that investors are pushing AI start-ups to target specific industries as a result. However, general-purpose models keep improving and can encroach on the capabilities of specialized versions, presenting a challenge for start-ups.
Ms. Pineau said that Cohere is equipped to offer businesses general-purpose tools, while going deeper into customization. “To get into markets and compete with the likes of Anthropic, OpenAI and so on, having really strong offerings that are specific to verticals, especially in regulated markets, makes us a very competitive player,” she said.